Our job as a regulator is to make sure that dentists and dental care professionals (DCPs) meet the standards we set when they join our registers, and carry on meeting those standards once they are on our registers.

One of the ways we do this is to quality assure UK dentist and DCP education and training for registration. All programmes and courses for undergraduate dental degree and DCP training must meet the standards we set and be approved by us.

Requirements

Our requirements for UK undergraduate dental degree and DCP education programmes are set out in the following documents:

• The First Five Years sets out our requirements for dental (dentist) undergraduate courses leading to GDC registration.
• Developing the Dental Team sets out our requirements for qualifications which lead to GDC registration for each of the six groups of DCPs.

Quality Assurance

We quality assure existing and new courses leading to registration for dentists and DCPs. We currently do this through an annual monitoring exercise and inspections. When we carry out an inspection, our inspectors produce reports on their findings.

Copies of Inspection Reports are available on this site.

It is also part of our job to make sure that dentists and DCPs who join our registers carry on meeting the standards we require throughout their careers. We do this in several ways:

• Dentists and DCPs are required to carry out continuing professional development (CPD) to keep up-to-date
• We are developing a system of revalidation, which will mean that all dental professionals have to be able to show on a regular basis that they continue to meet our standards for registration
• We hold specialist lists, of dentists who have met our standards for listing as a specialist in an area of dentistry, for example, orthodontics

Strategic Review of Education

We have recently carried out a review of what our role should be in future relation to the education of dentists and DCPs and how we can strengthen what we do to provide better protection for patients. The review was carried out by an Education Strategic Review Group, which reported to our Education Committee on 24 April 2008. We now plan to hold workshops with our key stakeholders to discuss the recommendations.

Read or download the Education Strategic Review Group final report

Implantology 
The Council's Education Committee has issued an interim policy statement in the light of concerns raised with us about the practice of implant dentistry by general dental practitioners.